Verizon Skyward lets company monitor all drone flights live

Commercial drone operators using Skyward Aviation Management Platform can now see the whereabouts of all their drones, in near real time, from anywhere.

The Verizon-owned company announced a new service, Live Flights, that tracks all of a company’s drones in what Skyward calls “essentially real time.” From either the company’s website or its app, a user can access the new Live flights map. This shows every one of their drone’s location and flight path over the last 60 seconds.

Clicking an aircraft on the map brings up detailed information, including aircraft ID, location, altitude, and velocity, as well as “key pilot information.”

At launch, however, Live Flights supports only aircraft from market leader DJI. Skyward says only that support for other makers is “planned for the future.” Skyward’s mobile app is for iOS only.

The company says that these new capabilities will be the basis for launching a remote ID service.

Live Flights serves as a foundation for Skyward’s implementation of Remote ID. With the ability to transmit live position and identification data, Skyward aims to become a Remote ID UAS Service Supplier (USS). Today, Skyward lets program managers know who’s flying and where, improving visibility and compliance for enterprise drone programs. Tomorrow, we look toward a system of Universal Traffic Management in the National Airspace System.